What the Hell, Ireland?

One of my ancestral countries, a country which has enjoyed great
prosperity and freedom with its capitalist democracy over the years
as a sovereign nation that at best makes no sense, and at worst mocks
their own struggles for the very freedom and liberties which
we Americans ourselves have fought for and cherish. Ireland's
national post office released a commemorative stamp honoring
Che Guevara, the communist revolutionary who was Fidel Castro's
top lieutenant in the unfortunately successful effort to instigate
a revolution which resulted in a communist dictatorship in Cuba
that still rules this nation with an iron fist.

The stamp shows a black, red and white drawing of Guevara
along with an envelope with a quote from his father: "In my son's
veins flowed the blood of Irish rebels." Where did your part-Irish
Peasant miss the era in Irish history in which Ireland threw out
the British, replacing the Crown with a communist revolutionary
state? It's awful enough when 20-something men and women
who are too young to have lived through the Cold War don T-shirts
with Che's image, mainly as a means of displaying their radical
chicness in hipster-frequented coffee shops and bars, but it's jaw-
droppingly shocking to see a country print postage stamps
honoring a cold-blooded totalitarian thug as Ireland is doing on
the 50th anniversary of Guevara's death by execution by a
Bolivian Army firing squad when he tried to bring a red revolution
to Bolivia. The struggle for Irish independence from Great Britain
was to achieve equality under the law, property rights, and political
self-determination beginning with Home Rule, establishing their own
legislature rather than having a distant British parliament dictate
how things would be in their native land. Communism and
communists are as far removed from these things as the sun is
from Pluto. Guevara having had some Irish blood is not a good
enough reason to honor him, given how he lived his life, forcing
oppression upon people under the weak guise of liberation.

During the rest of the Cold War years in the wake of Guevara's death,
the international Left made him a martyr to the cause of such
"liberation", but all one need to do is see the mass privation,
oppression, repression and broad suffering of the Cuban people
continuing today, under the rule of Raoul Castro, Fidel's brother who
succeeded his late sibling as Cuba's strongman. As horrible as British
rule was for over seven centuries in Ireland, it was not as much so as
the Cuban communist's regime's domination of that nation is, and
as the communist regimes in other nations from Soviet Russia to
China to North Korea to Vietnam to ... you get the point.

My dear ancestral country, please get a clue.


MEM